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Opinion: At the heart of London’s crisis is the decline of ‘middle-income’ households

Richard Florida

Every time I visit London, I hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he’ll nod towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel and say something like: “You see that building? Some of the flats cost £50m. And no one lives there — it’s always dark.”

The resurgence of London is one of the great urban success stories of our time, but it has brought with it a new set of challenges. For every shiny Lamborghini or Maserati that you see in Knightsbridge, there are countless lorry drivers, cooks, hairdressers, shop assistants, teachers and nurses in the city’s outer reaches who are struggling to get by. As…